Madrid’s street signage has gone through many phases from the square ceramic plaques of the 1760 General Visit to today’s bland blue plastic plaques.

In the 1930s, the City Council decided to change some of the blue enamelled plaques on the streets in the centre of the city for ceramic ones. They were commissioned from the students of the School of Ceramics and had illustrations about the history of each street. There were several batches of plaques and they can be distinguished by the number of tiles forming the image.

In the 1990s it was decided to order all the new plaques from the workshop of Alfredo Ruiz de Luna in Talavera, who manufactured about 1500 plaques of nine tiles with a baroque lettering which, based on ligatures, works just as well for Sol as for Desengaño.

Such a special letter has served as inspiration for many lettering commissions and even typefaces, such as Cibelina (Álvaro Yuste, 2014), Ferpal Sans (Silvia Ferpal, 2017) and Chulapa (Pablo Gámez and Joancarles Casasín, 2019), the latter commissioned by the City Council.

At Manufacturas Tipográficas Madrileñas we have tried to recreate Ruiz de Luna’s original handwriting and, above all, to give our hard-working users the possibility of fitting their messages into any composition. For this we have three axes: the usual width axis, another for tightness that replaces the logical spacing with another in which the letters fit better in small spaces, and a third axis of ligatures that activates increasingly strange ligatures (of course we can also activate the discretionary ligatures in the usual way).

As the tiles of Ruiz de Luna are not to be found in Ruiz Street, nor in Luna Street, we have called the font Pontejos 2, because the widower of Pontejos was the mayor who put some order in the streets of Madrid and because Pontejos square is the mecca of fringe, zips and fine trimmings.